Spikeh'd

As a mercenary developer, I come across programmers from many different walks of life; of all skill levels and abilities with varying levels of enthusiasm. Whilst I'm certainly not perfect (and am always learning), I encounter some who are yet to grasp some of the more basic programming concepts. It's very easy to take a blinkered view of the technologies you're familiar with and to become complacent in your current role or too comfortable with your existing skills. On the other hand, some developers I encounter are far keener than I, and therefore usually far exceed my skill; two things which are directly related. I speak from first hand experience when I say that by taking a step outside of your comfort zone and making even one or two small changes to your daily routine as a developer could seriously improve your general programming knowledge and overall productivity. Although not quite ad-verbatim, I think it was Scott Hanselmann who recently blogged that simply stat...

I'm currently in the process of writing my next personal project,  RustyShark  in .Net MVC3. It's a game and films review site, and will hopefully generate a bit of a community. Each review on the website has a comments form at the bottom that readers can use to post their own mini review, or just a simple comment. I'm using unobtrusive client side validation, but (as it should) the validation also occurs on the server side. This means that the user could potentially receive an error message on the comments form after a post-back but not notice it, as they will be redirected to the top of the page, rather than the comments form. The "read review" page is accessed via the fairly standard route /Reviews/Read/{titleURL}, which means the reviews controller exposes the Read action method. The Read method has a single override which is tagged with the [HttpPost] attribute as follows: public class ReviewsController : Controller { public ActionResult R...

I've been doing a lot of work with SSIS recently, and learning a lot on the way. One of my tasks over the last week was to convert each row of a result set in to XML and post it to a web service. The web service only accepted one row at a time, and generating XML in SSIS is not the most intuitive of tasks, so I wrote a script component to do the conversion work. Anyone who's tried anything more advanced than a "Hello World" example in a script component will be able to tell you that you cannot use breakpoints in them - making it quite difficult to debug even the simplest of code. For a developer such as myself, it's like having an arm removed in a horrific train accident. I had a bit of a task ahead of me - I had to create an XML document with tags containing attributes and values, attributes and child elements, child elements and values, attributes, child elements and values, then self-closing tags with some of the above... whilst not exactly a daunting task, i...

The development world has been coming up with ways to improve productivity for years. However since Visual Studio 2010 was released, with its fully extensible model, things have seriously changed. Most tools have been modified to extend VS2010's already pretty awesome IDE. With just a few extensions, you can fill in almost all of the gaps the Visual Studio team have left in the VS experience. I'm not a massive fan of NuGet; I use it, but not for production sites. It's good for quickly implementing a library in a test project, but I just don't like the "bloat" you end up with. I like to know what every single file does and why its there. The same goes for WebMatrix; although handy, I much prefer to manually create projects... I somehow feel like it makes it easier in the long run, even if it takes you a while to set them up in the first place. I recently purchased ReSharper (after trying trials a number of times over the years and not getting along with it)...

Recently I've been collaborating via Team Foundation Server 2010 - it's my first time, and I'll be honest... it was very gentle. It eased me in with its promise of improved Source Control (improved over Source Safe, that is) and toyed with me, sporting its ideals surrounding automated builds and work item collaboration. Whilst I've not been directly involved with the set up, using it on a daily basis has been a refreshing change. I'm one of those developers who obsessively refactors code, renames and moves files around until I'm happy everything is in the right place, so when using Source Safe, CVS or SVN, there's quite a bit of repeat work involved when it comes to making sure the source control server is also updated. Suffice to say that TFS 2010 works beautifully in this area, keeping the local, server and project file structure the same as each other. I've been exclusively working in Visual Studio 2010 for a while now, as I've been creating n...

A while ago, I set my default browser in Visual Studio 2010 to Google Chrome by using the "Browse With..." trick, and I've been happy with it for some time. Recently I've found that I've needed to do quite a bit of testing in IE, so I wanted to change it back. I went down the "Browse With..." route again, which seemed to work... but every time I close and re-opened Visual Studio, it reset itself back to Chrome. I've been living with it for a while, as I tend to do extended sessions anyway, so it's not been too much of a hassle... but today I've needed to close and restart Visual Studio a few times, so it's become a bit annoying. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it seems that when setting the "Browse With..." option in an MVC project, the settings aren't saved to the configuration file, probably because MVC projects don't actually have physical files to be "Browsed", unlike an ASP.Net project. I'm not ma...

I've just had a bit of a clean up with the blog - re-tagged most of my older posts and changed the layout slightly. I apologise if any of your readers have been spammed with updates - just ignore them if so :) I've also deleted some of my posts, most notable are the vast majority of the post relating to my bespoke nTier framework. Since I made them, I've made some significant changes, so the old posts don't really represent the end product any more, and will probably just confuse matters. I'm still working on it, and I've made some good progress. I'm also learning a hell of a lot in the process and getting to play with some cool tools like T4 and MVC3, Razor and unobtrusive JQuery. Instead of blogging while I'm writing it, I thought I would develop it as a standalone framework you can download and play with yourself. It's about 85% complete, and although other commitments are taking over at the moment, I'm trying my hardest to get it finished...